Several weeks ago, Richard “Specs” Simmons celebrated his 88th birthday at the North Beach bar that bears his name. It was, by all accounts, a blowout: 400 people showed up, including several members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Everybody knew each other, or at least seemed to. Specs, the belle of the ball, ate oysters and cheesecake all night. He was so happy.

The octogenarian had more to celebrate than another year of life: After months of uncertainty, he’d just renewed his lease on the space his bar has occupied since 1968. For that, he thanks the fact that on Aug. 10, Specs’ was one of the first nine businesses to be named a “legacy business” by the city of San Francisco.

“Almost every day, people had been coming up to me, going, ‘What are you going to do?’” says Elly Simmons, daughter of Specs. Friends and patrons knew that the lease was up in July, and a rent increase all but inevitable. While the landlords, she emphasizes, are “very decent,” she feared the worst. The bar (its full name is Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe) has always had five-year leases — and San Francisco’s real estate climate has changed a lot in the last five years. To say the least.

With the legacy business conferral, however, they signed not a five- but a 10-year lease, and while the rent did go up, Simmons laughs: “It could have been a lot worse.”

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

All kinds of drinkers go to Specs’ in North Beach.

All kinds of drinkers go to Specs’ in North Beach.

The legacy business program is brand new for San Francisco, created under the auspice of Proposition J, which passed in the fall. It’s said to be the first of its kind in the country.

“The program is designed to highlight businesses that have been in San Francisco for 30 or more years, that have survived and weathered the ups and downs of our economy,” explains Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business, which oversees the legacy business registry.

“We know San Franciscans love these businesses because they’ve kept them going. Because the environment with commercial rents is becoming very challenging, there’s a need from the community” to preserve businesses that have “helped define our neighborhoods for decades.”

Other approved businesses include Lone Star Saloon, the gay bar in SoMa; Precita Eyes, the arts organization famous for its Mission District murals; Cliff’s Variety in the Castro; and others. The plan is to approve more, and the hope is that other cities where gentrification threatens small business will follow suit.

The financial benefits of legacy-business-hood may not sound like much: The landlord (who cannot be the business owner) gets $4.50 per square foot per year, offsetting the tenant’s rent, if they extend the lease to a 10-year term, and the business gets a grant of $500 per year per full-time employee.

But for Specs Simmons at his birthday party, slurping down oysters, a $500 grant was not top of mind.

Any subscriber to The San Francisco Chronicle who has not yet been to Specs’ needs to put down this newspaper immediately and hike over to Columbus Avenue. Nestled in an alleyway between Tosca Cafe and Devil’s Acre, Specs’ is an institution — because of its longevity, because of its inexhaustible permanent collection of tchotchkes (some educational, some scatological) and mostly, I suspect, because it still provides vivid access to a North Beach whose existence flickers more faintly each year.

The bohemian North Beach, the seedy North Beach, the artist’s North Beach — this remains Specs’ North Beach.

Elly Simmons gives an example of her milieu, and the population that has kept the bar in business for nearly 50 years: “I’ve got this one new friend, a young poet character named Wolfgang, who lives in the Basque Hotel. When you know mostly artists, people who live in SROs, they’re spending all their time in bars and cafes.

“The only time we bought a television was for the landing on the moon,” she adds. She means the one in 1969.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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People have drinks at Specs’ in San Francisco.

People have drinks at Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco is a treasure trove of memorabilia and artifacts.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco is a treasure trove of memorabilia and artifacts.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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Owner Elly Simmons at Specs’ in San Francisco.

Owner Elly Simmons at Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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Jessica Loos and Gregg Martinez have a drink at the bar.

Jessica Loos and Gregg Martinez have a drink at the bar.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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Alice Clifford, left, and Melissa Fitzgerald have a drink at the main area of Specs’.

Alice Clifford, left, and Melissa Fitzgerald have a drink at the main area of Specs’.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The bar at Specs’

The bar at Specs’

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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People have drinks at Specs’ in San Francisco.

People have drinks at Specs’ in San Francisco.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

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The newspaper clippings from the infamous night when Specs and friends were rescued at sea.

The newspaper clippings from the infamous night when Specs and friends were rescued at sea.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

Specs’ bar sees its legacy in North Beach

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Nor is there Wi-Fi, or anything like that; Specs wants you to talk to your bar mates. Yet the atmosphere doesn’t feel sexually aggressive. Specs’ is famous for its supply of business-card-size admonishments, which you are encouraged to employ in your rebuffing of unwanted suitors: “Madam, the gentleman prefers to sulk in silence” and “Sir, the lady is not interested in your company.” Specs’ was doing the informed-consent thing way before it was cool.

Simmons describes her father as stubbornly averse to change, a quality that surely worked in their favor before the legacy business commission. Specs was long known to bestow a plaque that read “unfit to drink” upon any customer who tried to order a drink he deemed inappropriate.

“I said I wished we could serve Dark & Stormys here because I have to go to Vesuvio’s for that,” Elly Simmons says. Her dad wouldn’t stand for it.

The drinks, still cheap, are basic; the decor at Specs’ is anything but. Ask a regular to point out some of this museum’s must-see pieces, or you might end up roaming the bar and staring at the walls all night.

For example: an Alaskan king crab. Busts of Specs’ bespectacled face, fashioned American Indian-style. A petrified soda bottle in a display case, with a handwritten index card detailing its backstory (shipwreck, Australia, 19th century). Antique maps of Chinatown. Most notably, an oosik. (Don’t Google that if you’re at work right now.)

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

The interior of Specs’ in San Francisco.

You’ll also find framed newspaper evidence of Specs’ notorious near-encounter with death in 1969. Around 1:30 a.m. on one September morning, following a night of drinking in Fisherman’s Wharf, Specs and friends got on a boat in the San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles bound.

“A couple of the guys were seasoned sailors. The rest weren’t,” Elly Simmons says. “The hatch started sinking just as soon as they got out of the gate.”

Seeking a lighthouse, her father swam for help through the freezing swells, holding his Coleman lantern just above the water, until miraculously he was noticed by the owner of Sausalito’s No-Name Bar, who must have shared a penchant for late-night sailing. He called the Coast Guard, which rescued Specs’ crew from under the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Apparently the alcohol in their system was the only thing that kept them from freezing to death,” Elly Simmons reports. Specs’ glasses stayed on the whole time.

You couldn’t devise a better quasi-origin story for Specs’, a museum that deals in legend, true and otherwise. The theatrical shipwreck story has all the makings of a North Beach classic: sodden sailors, publican saviors, salvation by inebriation.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

Jack Yaghubian and Joanna Lioce have drinks at Specs in San Francisco, Calif. on August 20th, 2016.

Jack Yaghubian and Joanna Lioce have drinks at Specs in San...

At 88, health problems keep Specs away from the bar more than he would like. He still lives in North Beach, where he’s lived for decades, where he met his former wife, Sonia (at Vesuvio; he was her bartender), where he raised his family. Elly and her daughter, both co-owners in the bar, will be its future stewards. She’s been working on a documentary about her father for the last decade.

Will the legacy status keep Specs’ alive forever? It was enough to renew Specs’ lease this time around, but $4.50 a square foot won’t pay the rent. Whether the legacy business program’s symbolic value can buoy the bar forever remains to be seen.

Last week, I was sitting at Specs’ one afternoon, and next to me at the bar was a man who couldn’t have been much younger than Specs himself. He spoke in an accent that I could not place, but his grandfatherly curmudgeon was recognizably American.

“I used to go to five bars a day,” he began. “The Richmond, the Mission, downtown. All of them. But now all the bars in the city have become sports bars. They have plasma TVs everywhere. Everywhere you go, people at bars, they’re just texting each other.

“This is one of the last bars in the city where you can get booze and conversation,” the man said, triumphantly. “Booze and conversation: That’s all I want!”